Less than an hour after photos were uploaded to his Instagram account, the work was gone.
A new artwork by Banksy was removed from its location in London shortly after the artist uploaded images to his Instagram account on December 22.
The new work by the anonymous artist is a metal traffic stop sign featuring three images of aircraft resembling military drones. It was installed on a street sign in the South London neighborhood of Peckham.
Public viewing of the new Banksy work didn’t last very long. (Photo by Aaron Chown/PA Images via Getty Images)After images of the stop sign were posted on Banksy’s popular account (which has 12.1 million followers), commenters immediately responded that it would soon be taken and sold online.
Around 12:30 p.m., two people used bolt cutters and a Lime bicycle to remove the artwork. A witness named Alex told the Sun that one of the people initially tried hitting it with his hands and fell off the bike before returning with the bolt cutters.
The incident follows several other times Banksy has been in the news this year. A mural on Valentine’s Day about domestic violence prompted the removal of a chest freezer twice, a couple discovered a large seagull painted on their home would cost $250,000 to remove, a 500-year-old farmhouse with a large Banksy mural of a young boy was demolished in March, and a damaged mural in Venice painted in 2019 will be restored through private funding. Banksy’s identity was also recently revealed through an archival interview with the BBC.